Allegedly reacting to some sort of hallucinogenic fever dream following an overlong bubble bath during which he reportedly sputtered lots of motorboat noises and ate one too many purple crayons, President Bush today made the stunning yet somehow entirely understandable announcement that all Republicans in his administration are hereby officially excused from any and all crimes they have committed, are in the process of committing, are planning to commit, or even merely fantasize about committing while encased in sweaty latex bodysuits in any one of a number of GOP-friendly D.C. fetish dungeons.

"People! My people!" Bush shouted suddenly during an otherwise completely useless press conference, raising his arms over his head and tilting his head back and convulsing slightly, just as a nameless reporter finished asking a question about... oh like it even matters because we all know the answer would've been complete bulls--- anyway so let's just say, immigration policy reform.

"Come to me, you shockingly large numbers of corrupt and disgraced Republican senators, representatives, aides, deputies, secretaries, lobbyists, governors and mayors and secretly gay meth-snorting right-wing Christian evangelists, and I shall remove from you the burden of legal, ethical, spiritual and yes even genital responsibility for all crimes you have almost certainly committed under the dark umbrella that is me! I am the walrus!"

Bush was apparently emboldened by his unprecedented and widely reviled commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence just recently, a move widely considered to be one of the more repellent abuses of power in a kaleidoscopic drunken funhouse of abuses lo these past 6.5 years, though he appeared to be staring up at the heavens as he spoke, just little bit astonished that lightning was not striking him dead on the spot.

Curiously, the bizarre announcement came as no surprise to White House insiders. An anonymous source close to the president suggested that Bush secretly hoped that, if he made another big, vaguely unconstutional, degrading announcement that stabbed at the very heart of the republic, Dick Cheney might come up from behind again and give him another approving pat on the butt, much like a master gives a puppy. Cheney was unavailable for comment, as he was off shooting hundreds of flightless pheasants in the face with a shotgun from 2 feet away, and chuckling sinisterly.

Stunned reporters who attempted to ask Bush some immediate follow-up questions were quickly shouted down by the president. "Yay, me! The list of criminals in my administration is so long, I thought I'd just take care of it all in one file swipe," Bush shouted, apparently invoking yet another cute Bushism that might or might not refer, Freudian-slip style, to his love of either illegal wiretapping, Karl Rove's 'accidentally' deleted emails, or Lynne Cheney's secret stash of erotic lesbian digital photography.

White House spokesman and former Fox News automaton Tony Snow, himself rumored to be seeking regular psychiatric treatment to combat recurring nightmares in which his emaciated soul is being eaten by angry pink rabbits in a dank Wal-Mart sub-basement in Alabama, was quick to step in and deflect reporters' questions as Bush was carefully led offstage, frothing slightly at the mouth.

"Let me say right here and now: It is fully within the president's constitutional right to, uh, preemptively pardon all criminal Republicans who are all, of course, totally innocent and who have all been -- or, you know, will soon be -- wrongly accused by terrorist-loving liberals who hate our freedoms and have a very obvious gay agenda," he muttered, his eyes rolling around in his skull like marbles in Satan's pinball machine.

"Hey! Don't forget the crazy stuff Bill Clinton did almost 10 years ago! Oh my God! And what about Sept. 11th? Your children are in danger! Twin towers! Death from above! Support our troops! Gay agenda! Watch Fox News or the terrorists win! P.S.: Ann Coulter, please call me because you left a spiked bra and a switchblade and a gallon of ketamine at my apartment. Thank you. No more questions at this time."

Word of the Universal Republican Pardon (URP) quickly spread to the current Democratic congressional leadership, who were, naturally, slightly upset.

"This is a true outrage!" screamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, apparently frantically entering search terms into Wikipedia in her office iMac in an attempt to see what the hell was actually happening.

"He can't do that! Wait, can he? Can he do that? Isn't there some sort of, like, legal or constitutional mechanism in place to stop him from doing stuff like that?" Pelosi scanned the confused faces of the various congressional aides standing around her office, but got nothing back but lots of people staring at their feet. "Hello? Anyone? What the hell do I pay you people for?!"

Pelosi then sighed heavily and sipped some organic green tea. "You know what it makes me wish? It makes me wish there some sort of, say, large political body here in Washington, one that was right now controlled by, say, a completely different political party than this awful president," she said wistfully, as the aides glanced at each other furtively and rolled their eyes.

"Wouldn't that be great? And this group would have, say, some sort of legal and political oversight power to step in and stop this sort of thing, to formally rebuke the president and demand some sort of accountability and maybe even launch formal impeachment proceedings? Can you imagine?"

"I like to think it would be some sort of deeply flawed but absolutely essential system of, oh I don't know, checks and balances or something, and it would help ensure that this cretinous mealy mouthed little sonofabitch couldn't get away with stuff like this anymore.

"That would be so cool, wouldn't it? Man, I wish we had something like that here in America. Don't you?"

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.